"so we developed a few desktop extensions like the Start menu, that went as Zorin taskbar and we're really excited to see that other projects were forking it and using the code that we wrote for example Dash to panel that's that's based on zorin taskbar, Arc menus based on our..."
Would love to hear the story because currently, I can see that both Zorin Menu and Zorin taskbar are a fork of Arc Menu and Dash to Panel. So what came first?
To understand the full context behind these extensions, I'll need to give you a bit of the back story:
When we decided to move to GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment for Zorin OS 12 in early 2016, there weren't any sufficiently polished start menu and taskbar extensions so we had to make them ourselves.
Since their release, the codebases of the Zorin Menu and Zorin Taskbar extensions were forked by other developers to create the Arc Menu and Dash to Panel projects respectively.
When the Dash to Panel project was started in late 2016, the original maintainer changed the overarching architecture of how the extension works but kept most of the internal logic and code from Zorin Taskbar. By the time we began developing Zorin OS 16 in 2020, the Dash to Panel project amassed a lot of features and updates from many contributors to the point that it actually made more sense for us to re-base Zorin Taskbar on it and contribute to both projects going forward.
While the Arc Menu code was originally forked directly from Zorin Menu, it appears that the contributors re-wrote their extension a while later, so its codebase has since diverged significantly from that of Zorin Menu.